Look at the Dates
It was the opposite.
It was a kind of discipline, the careful daily discipline of not looking, which takes far more effort than looking does.
Every Friday I performed a small act of not-adding, the way you perform a small act of not-touching a bruise, and the performance was so routine that I had stopped noticing I was doing it.
A person can keep an enormous number small by refusing, week after week, to let it sit next to any other number.
The moment I set it beside the groceries and the shoes and the three years of Fridays, it stopped being small, instantly and permanently, and I understood that my parents had been relying, whether they knew it or not, on exactly the discipline I had been practicing against myself.
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